How A Broken Plastic Cap On A Rainy Jobsite Led To A Patented Safety Fix

Written by:

Heather Hook

Date:

24 Aug 2026

KeyCrew Studio

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A rainy Saturday, a jobsite that could not sit unprotected over the weekend, and a supply of plastic safety caps that had already broken and blown away. That was the moment Anthony Burr decided the industry needed a better fix, and it led to the founding of Safety Pickets, Inc., a company now shipping a patented steel cap through Bunnings Warehouse stores across Australia and preparing for a launch in the United States.

Burr spent years working as a concreter, setting up steel star pickets and T-posts to form the slabs for new home builds. Every exposed post needed a plastic cap on top to stop workers from cutting themselves or worse. The problem was the caps did not hold up. They cracked in the sun, snapped off in the wind, and had to be replaced constantly, leaving sharp steel exposed on active job sites.

A Frustration Years In The Making

According to Burr, the caps had been an ongoing, compounding problem for years before he acted on it. The breaking point came on a Saturday shift working in the rain, when he ran out of plastic caps again and had to leave the site to buy more just to keep it safe over the weekend.

“That’s when the idea came to me, and I thought, I’m going to explore this and see if we can create a solution,” Burr said. He started looking for someone who could help build a steel alternative. The response was not encouraging at first.

“The first 10 to 15 people that I went to said, ‘ Oh, you can’t do this; it’s not possible,” Burr said. “I thought, all right, well, I don’t give up that easily.”

From Prototype To Patent

Burr eventually found a manufacturer willing to try, and the first working version confirmed his instinct that the idea had real potential. From there, the product went through significant redesign. The earliest version was bulky and had to be welded onto the post by hand. The current design is lightweight and presses directly onto the picket, removing the need for any extra labor on site.

The company has since patented the design in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States. That early validation, combined with growing safety expectations on construction, civil, agricultural, and municipal sites, led to a distribution agreement with Bunnings Warehouse, the largest hardware and trade retailer in Australia, with no smaller regional distributors in between.

The product itself, built from high-strength low-alloy steel, is designed to eliminate sharp edges and injury risk while replacing a single-use plastic item that ends up as landfill and roadside litter after every project. More detail on how the cap is built and where it fits on a jobsite is available on the Safety Pickets product page.

What Comes Next

With the Bunnings rollout underway across every Australian state, Burr said the next phase is entering the US market and finding the right distribution partner there. He pointed to conversations already underway with contacts in Florida’s road and infrastructure sector as an early signal of interest.

For Burr, the story behind the product matters as much as the product itself. A tool built out of genuine, repeated frustration on a real jobsite, rather than a corporate research exercise, is what he believes will resonate with US buyers and partners evaluating the company for the first time.

Safety Pickets, Inc. was founded by Anthony Burr to solve a problem he saw firsthand on job sites: plastic caps breaking and exposing sharp steel pickets. The company’s patented, reusable steel cap is distributed through Bunnings Warehouse in Australia and is now expanding into the US market. Learn more at safetypickets.com.

This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.

Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.